What conditions affect conditions?

[Octane.7029]

I’m sort of a new player and trying to understand conditions and what affects them. From what I’ve been told, the more condition damage you acquire “gear, etc.” the higher the output of the condition and that’s the only thing that affects condition damage. What I don’t understand is when I look at build guides that are dps condi based builds, they recommend Viper’s gear “power, precision, condition, expertise”, but why? I didn’t think power or precision would affect condi damage. Wouldn’t  gear like Trail Blazer’s “toughness, vitality, condition, expertise” be more beneficial having the survivability and same damage output as Viper’s gear? Thanks in advance!

[kitkat.2745]

You can absolutely sub viper's gear for trailblazer's! Your condi damage output will be the same (for example, a level 80 exo viper's weapon has 205 condition damage and 113 expertise, as does trailblazer's). Viper's is 'glass cannon' gear, to maximize your DPS, including on-hit damage with weapons; trailblazer's is for survivability, and is especially nice for classes that scale damage/condition damage on vitality. It's really up to you whether you prefer the tankier approach or the glass cannon approach. If you are a newer player still learning the combat ropes and ins and outs of your class, I would even recommend taking trailblazer's over viper's. 

[Eponet.4829]

1 hour ago, Octane.7029 said:

I’m sort of a new player and trying to understand conditions and what affects them. From what I’ve been told, the more condition damage you acquire “gear, etc.” the higher the output of the condition and that’s the only thing that affects condition damage. What I don’t understand is when I look at build guides that are dps condi based builds, they recommend Viper’s gear “power, precision, condition, expertise”, but why? I didn’t think power or precision would affect condi damage. Wouldn’t  gear like Trail Blazer’s “toughness, vitality, condition, expertise” be more beneficial having the survivability and same damage output as Viper’s gear? Thanks in advance!

 

Guides suggest Viper's Gear because even if you're primarily doing condition damage, the power isn't useless because most condition applying skills also do some degree of direct damage.

 

Additionally, a lot of classes have traits that cause critical hits to apply conditions to varying degrees of effectiveness (ranging from pretty meh in the case of elementalist's Arcane Precision to absolutely amazing in the case of Virtuoso's Jagged Mind) , making the precision from viper gear even the condition damage part of your damage above what you'd get with Trailblazer.

[Urud.4925]

They are both viable choices. For my condi soulbeast I chose Viper weapon + trinkets (the higher source of your stats), but Trailblazer armor, for a bit more tankiness (since I use this character to solo champions). So it depends also on what you want to do. If you play in group, you can probably go full Viper. Trailblazer gear also used to be quite expensive years ago (I didn't check the price of the Lily flowers nowadays).

But to answer to your question: conditional damage and expertise are definitely the most important stats you want to consider. Then precision and power are always useful if you think you can survive fine without that extra vitality or toughness.

Don't take the meta builds as the Bible: they are the optimal choice for the optimal rotations, but you don't fight always against a dummy.

Edited October 6, 2022 by Urud.4925

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

You can also run a mix of both. For open-world and story I found half Trailblazer to be plenty, and the rest Viper. For the purpose of mixing remember that your trinkets have most of your stats (half your stats), and armor and weapons combined are the other half. Armor contributes the least of everything.

 

Celestial also makes a good filler stat when you need to round off some numbers, and its easy to get a set of trinkets from the Laurel merchant. Celestial has the same amount of Expertise as Viper.

 

Lastly you can easily max your condition duration for all conditions by using a mix of Viper, Trailblazer and Bringer's along with Nightmare runes, Sigil of Malice (1x only) and Super Veggie Pizza. This will get you to 100% for everything on every class if mixed right, and it still ends up being pretty tanky. But its extremely inefficient if your class only does one condition (e.g Guardian, who does only burning damage with a few bleeds) and in that case you should take mostly Grieving stats, Balthazar runes, etc. instead.

 

As a general rule, you should stack condition damage up to 1k, but past this you should focus on Expertise first; maxing your condition duration will get you more damage than taking condition damage further, due to the way Might-stacking works. The only exception is in very short battles where you don't get enough ramp-up time, but condi is already going to be alot worse than power in these fights anyway.

Edited October 6, 2022 by Mariyuuna.6508

[AliamRationem.5172]

To provide a little context, on my condi weaver in Trailblazer I deal about 90% of my damage from conditions and 10% from power.  In Viper it's more like 75/25.  As the condition damage is the same (without accounting for traits that apply conditions on critical hit), this represents a significant increase in damage.  It's also direct damage, which means your burst within very short windows of time will be even stronger than the advantage over time.

In solo play, this may not always be worthwhile as you could be forced to play more defensively, losing the DPS advantage.  Or you may even die to things you wouldn't have in Trailblazer stats.  However, in group play where you have support, there's really no need for the extra defenses and the damage becomes pure gain.

[Teratus.2859]

Really depends on your playstyle and what your doing.

Vipers will definitely give you the DPS boost at the cost of defence but if your playing solo all the time and fighting big things with spongy health bars then it becomes a battle of endurance and tankier stats are going to help you win those more than pure DPS will most of the time.

As far as precision goes well that will depend on class and gear.
You need to check your traits, sigils and runes to see if you can get any condition benefit out of this stat.
There are some ways you can get more conditions or condition chance by having higher precision so have a good look through your traits etc to see if that's worth investing in.

[Danikat.8537]

2 hours ago, Urud.4925 said:

Don't take the meta builds as the Bible: they are the optimal choice for the optimal rotations, but you don't fight always against a dummy.

Another thing to bear in mind is a lot of meta-builds are designed to be used together in group instances like raids and Fractals. They can afford to miss important things from individual builds because you can depend on someone else in the group providing it.

If you're putting together a build for groups it's worth checking what other people in your group will be using so you can all coordinate. If you're going to be using LFG I think it's worth sacrificing a little bit of damage to make yourself less squishy and if there's any boons you absolutely need or anything like that you should make sure you're bringing them yourself.
 

2 hours ago, Mariyuuna.6508 said:

You can also run a mix of both. For open-world and story I found half Trailblazer to be plenty, and the rest Viper. For the purpose of mixing remember that your trinkets have most of your stats (half your stats), and armor and weapons combined are the other half. Armor contributes the least of everything.

That's what I was going to suggest. I think for most things full Trailblazers would be over-kill (or under-kill, since it's reducing damage) but I really like builds with some passive defence so I can afford to make some mistakes or run through AoE to revive someone if I want to. Several of my characters use a mix of sets to get the stats I want, it can take some experimenting to get the balance right but I think it's a good solution.

[Octane.7029]

Thanks all! My 3 "go to" characters are Engi, Necro, and  Ranger. Trying different builds can get expensive if you don't know what you're doing haha.

[kharmin.7683]

22 hours ago, Octane.7029 said:

Thanks all! My 3 "go to" characters are Engi, Necro, and  Ranger. Trying different builds can get expensive if you don't know what you're doing haha.

You might consider browsing through the different profession sub-forums for those to see what other players have been building.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

On 10/6/2022 at 8:52 AM, Octane.7029 said:

Thanks all! My 3 "go to" characters are Engi, Necro, and  Ranger. Trying different builds can get expensive if you don't know what you're doing haha.

Make sure you're also using a build editor before trying anything in-game. This lets you know what the results of mixing certain gearsets will be before you even buy or craft them.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/

Edited October 7, 2022 by Mariyuuna.6508

[Blude.6812]

To quote Kenny Rogers and The First Edition " I just dropped in to see what condition my conditions was in"